AT&T defends Verizon-Google mobile exemption from net neutrality

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  • Reply 41 of 90
    sheffsheff Posts: 1,407member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by WIJG View Post


    God this is a depressing thread.



    The issue is private property. All rights are property rights. If you own something, it's yours and no one can tell you what to do with it. If you want to share your property with others, you get to set the terms, and others are free to accept or reject those terms.



    That is what capitalism is: the free exchange of value for value. In any criticism of capitalism, it is necessary to know who the applicable property owners are and how free any given party is to choose.



    No one owns the internet, but people and corporations do own computers, servers, copper wires, optic fibers, cable, cell towers, etc.



    Supporters of net neutrality want the power to tell others what they can do with their own property. That's it. Whatever justification is used, that's what they want. And that's why it's a bad idea.



    Not true. No one in a society is truly free. Everything you do affects the society, and everything the society does might impact you. We have rights for people to own things, but we do regulate how those things can be used. You can own a gun, but you can't kill people unless it's self defense.



    Large corporations are private, but are asked not to discriminate by society. There are also regulations on food farms, which are private but are asked to adhere to certain food safety guidelines.



    Finally remember this: everyone (US citizens) gets to vote in the government, only select few get to vote in a corporation. I would like to have government have some say over what goes on then none at all.
  • Reply 42 of 90
    wijgwijg Posts: 99member
    "Society" is an abstraction borne of multiple individuals. Individuals have rights; "society" does not. Objective laws ensure that one's right to swing his fists ends where the noses of other individuals begin. Have a nice day.
  • Reply 43 of 90
    bwikbwik Posts: 565member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jz1492 View Post


    You scare me.



    The most corruption, collusion and coercion has always been on the part of governments, but for them, the individual means nothing, unless it is the "right" kind of individual, that is, yet it's easy to fall through the cracks.



    Armchair dictators calling for a bigger dictatorship is the preamble for bad things happening.



    No dictator ever became one to be evil. There is always some "noble" purpose and widespread support, even for hitler. You should look up nazism in wikipedia for a brief reminder.



    In freedom, we let the consumer be the judge, and keep barriers to entry low so there is always a fresh selection. The carriers "own" their bands because of government collusion, go figure --could it be because governments are always desperate for more and more revenue?



    Don't fall in the trap, stand for lawfulness and let the markets sort it out.



    I can undertand my post was completely unvarnished in terms of encouraging corporations to obey the fundamental restrictions placed on them by our freedoms. Which include freemcommunications and a lack of corporate censorship. If they can't uphold this basic duty, the government has sovereign powers to correct them. As was done to ATT long ago. This is actually good for business. A fair and neutral communications system is probably essential to any modern economy..... And culture.



    I continue to maintain the radio spectrum of our air should not be sold -- for all time -- to businesses that aren't loyal to the public welfare. Instead maybe the spectrum can be subject to state or federal property tax, so it isn't used as a barrier to competition. Price compeition is important for these things. My bottom line is we can't have 3 companies first monopolizing spectrum, then censoring content. Thats not free market and there are strong US legal remedies to make the industry conform to the market's rules.
  • Reply 44 of 90
    sheffsheff Posts: 1,407member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by WIJG View Post


    "Society" is an abstraction borne of multiple individuals. Individuals have rights; "society" does not. Objective laws ensure that one's right to swing his fists ends where the noses of other individuals begin. Have a nice day.



    We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
  • Reply 45 of 90
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by wizard69 View Post


    This is a huge issue and frankly nobody in Washington is standing up and backing the agressive regulation required. Without somebody slapping some sense into the telcos and by extension some of the stupid users the system will turn into a mess of poor performance and very high prices for what you get.



    Dave



    Wrong. There are a number of people fighting for net neutrality in D.C. Al Franken is leading the charge in the Senate. I encourage everyone to sign his petition and call your Senators and Representatives.



    http://alfranken.com/



    Just enter your address here and it'll tell you who your reps are and provide contact info:

    http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
  • Reply 46 of 90
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dasein View Post


    Get your facts straight. You've got everything bass-ackwards. The subsidies were during the age of Ma Bell when ATT was a handmaiden of the government. Now these same companies have to bid and pay billions in frequency auctions to the government. Secondly, in all this mindless net neutrality debate, I've yet to hear a clear, convincing case of where someone's been denied anything. The military doesn't run anything anymore. It relinquished control in 1994. MaBell was broken up in 1984. The key goal is competition. Government involvement means singular, centralized control. The major success of the Internet has been that it's so far kept a few steps ahead of the mindless political class and bureaucraps in D.C.



    Get your facts straight. It went from 1 Pie to 12 Pies. The money continues to pour into the Telcos, each year for tax subsidies that add up tens of billions per year. Or do you think when T-Mobile paid ~ $16 Billion for a portion of spectrum they had the cash on hand for that investment?



    MaBell breaking up created zero new competition. It legalized 12 regional monopolies. If you can't figure that out either you were a thought in your mother's mind or you were too young to realize Reagan conned everyone, or perhaps you suck off the teet of the Reagan Revolution?



    We went from 12 regional Bells down to three Bells. Verizon is dumping much of their local phone services when it costs too much for them to service [Frontier anyone?] and are taking that cash to build out FiOS in high density [high price point] regions, piggy backing LTE on those fiber back ends. When Frontier screws up they will sell off large chunks back to Verizon.



    Rinse and repeat.



    When I can choose, without any early cancellation fee, from AT&T as my Fiber provider, or Verizon, or Qwest or my local Municipality, then I have Competition. Until then, I've got a licensed Oligopoly giving me a dry run back slide.
  • Reply 47 of 90
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member
    I think a network delivering 3.6 million TB/month would be an incredibly complicated thing, especially a mobile one. The engineers will need all their skill to make it work. They will need to be making decisions purely on a technical basis, not on some regulation handed down from Washington.



    Anyway how does it help Apple to set a precedent that it is perfectly ok to take over the work of another, and set the terms of it's use? They would surely be bitten by such a precedent in the (most likely near) future.
  • Reply 48 of 90
    Complete BS. There's a lesson to be learned here:



    Once upon a time fiber optics were limited to much slower speeds. Increased demand for bandwidth created innovation and drove down costs: 100Mbit/sec, 1000Mbit/sec, 10000Mbit/sec. Eventually prices got so low the idea of doing FTTH was viable. This happened because applications were free to use bandwidth and create demand. What AT&T, Verizon and Google are purposing is to curb the demand by controlling what the medium can be used for. There are already emerging wireless advancements besides 4G -- such as QAM1024 modulation which effectively quadruples bandwidth in the same channel space. 5G and 6G technologies, ridding on much larger spectrum allocations, are going to be massively faster than anything we have today. Well -- they would have been. Now when it comes time to do an upgrade they'll just turn the dial down on COMPETING VIDEO SERVICE, or ILLEGAL FILES, and 5G, 6G evolution will be pushed further into the future to save telcos money. Google, for whatever screwed up anti-competitive reason, thinks this is just fine. Shame on them.
  • Reply 49 of 90
    This study claims Google will sucks 37 % of internet bandwidth by only paying a fraction of it's cost.

    http://www.internetevolution.com/aut...&doc_id=168932



    The biggest share of traffic comes from P2P and video/audio streaming.

    I didn't find the the study which claimed that 75 % of internet bandwidth is consumed by video, butt let's assume these numbers are correct.

    http://connectedplanetonline.com/acc...eloading-1205/



    The bandwidth consumption of the mobile internet is growing at a rate that exceeds the the possible (technical) growth rate of the networks.

    So bandwidth gets the limiting factor for Google's growth.

    The solution is to assure as much as they can. That's what this discussion is about.



    The carriers are pleased because they can count on some additional money they wouldn't get with the "traditional" model while being aware that without network management they will not meet the demand. This looks like a win-win situation for them. They can limit some heavy traffic demanding services and charging the big ones more accurate.



    The problem is where this will lead to. Other big players will have to do the same deals to ensure the bandwidth for their customers. Apple, MS, Oracle, SAP etc. can't sit and wait until all bandwidth is allocated.



    This might lead to a two-class society and a oligopoly of vendors of fast and reliable mobile internet services. The problem for the carriers is that they will get more and more dependent on those big service companies and they will face an even bigger pressure on prices as today, plus the risk to get absorbed by companies like Google. I think Google would like to have their own networks and they were officially thinking about buying frequencies or building fibre networks.



    If this happens this will not be a win-win situation any more. The consumers will loose anyway.The current situation of paying more for more consumption seems to be more fair to me. If this means that I have to pay more for heavy use of video on wireless networks than I prefer this to the other scenario.
  • Reply 50 of 90
    old-wizold-wiz Posts: 194member
    whatever the "gifts" from the telcos persuades them to do. Sometimes I wonder if congress and the federal agencies have secret price lists for how much corporations have to pay to get exemptions and favorable laws. The telcos have way more money than voters or consumers. We're no longer living in a democracy but in a plutocracy, which gives us the worst government money can buy.
  • Reply 51 of 90
    blastdoorblastdoor Posts: 3,583member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by WIJG View Post


    God this is a depressing thread.



    The issue is private property. All rights are property rights.



    According to whom? The goddess Ayn Rand?



    The problem with you glibertarians is that you start off with some ridiculous assertion that you yell in everyones face as if it were engraved in stone tablets by the finger of god, and then you proceed to rant for page after page with all your wing nut theories that you derive from your wing nut assumptions. You are a child.
  • Reply 52 of 90
    wijgwijg Posts: 99member
    I haven't yelled at anyone. I haven't ranted either. I built an argument from a premise and defended it. What is your alternative?



    We're all somebody's children.
  • Reply 53 of 90
    anonymouseanonymouse Posts: 6,976member
    Government guarantee of net neutrality rights will not, as some ideologically pure but entirely naive posters have absurdly suggested, result in communism or fascism*. The truth is that net neutrality is necessary for the maintenance of a healthy free society, and those who would oppose it are the enemies of a free society.



    Communications has from the beginning of civilization been recognized as an essential function of maintaining a society. Monarchs, dictators and juntas have all been zealous in controlling communications to maintain their power. He who controls communication, controls the society. In a democracy, that means controlling communications for the benefit of the people, if control is to remain with the people. Maintaining a healthy democracy is a constant struggle against those who seek to undermine it for their own purposes.



    And, as has been pointed out in this thread, the idea of corporations regulating themselves and acting for the benefit of the people has been shown, through history, to be on its face absurd. It never has and never will work. The only effective way to insure that the public is not harmed by private interests is with government intervention -- i.e., intervention by the representatives of the people.



    In this instance, there is no difference in it's importance to a healthy democracy between wireline and wireless communication. Don't be fooled by interested parties and the naive who will tell you that these are fundamentally different technologies. They aren't. In the context of their importance to our society, to the health of our democracy, to the maintenance of our fundamental freedoms, they are exactly the same, ought to be treated exactly the same, and ought to be open on equal terms with anyone with a voice to be heard.



    Some of the players who have weighed in against net neutrality ought not be surprising. Verizon and AT&T of course wish control this issue to their advantage, and at our expense. For anyone who viewed Google as an honest player, this demonstration of the eagerness with which it abandoned its professed principles ought to at least give you pause to think. So much for hollow promises of doing no evil and supporting net neutrality. What we get instead is a lot of doublespeak crafted to make people think they are doing exactly the opposite of what they are. Talk of openness and preserving net neutrality when in fact they are putting their every effort into killing it.





    * In fact, the ridiculous full on property rights based libertarianism espoused by one poster is exactly the thing that will inevitably lead to fascism, despite it's adherents telling us it is the one true path to freedom. The paradox of libertarianism where government does nothing but protect property rights is that as property will naturally become more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the government becomes nothing but a tool of the corporatist interests that end up controlling it. Anyone worried about the slippery slope to fascism ought to be much more worried about the five conservatives on the US Supreme Court than anything else.
  • Reply 54 of 90
    solipsismsolipsism Posts: 25,726member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Blastdoor View Post


    Unlike many of the whiners who post in forums such as this, I actually applaud AT&T for their new tiered data plans for the iPhone -- I'm saving money with the new plan, and it should help AT&T better deal with demand for bandwidth.



    Me too, and this from someone using 40GB a month at one time and have kept my unlimited plan specifically in case i need to tether again in the future. Looking at everyone posting their average monthly usage most seem to be able to save money each month unless they were violating their contract.



    Of course, this is a sliding scale and I would bet that most users will be using more data in a year than they do now, for various reasons. At least AT&T did three smart things that they should get some credit for:

    [size=1][*]They let current users keep unlimited plans so long as their accounts are in good standing. I figure the high data users on AT&T probably got an iPhone a long time ago.[*]They made it 2GB (and not 1GB like I've seen for other countries) which should give nearly all a comfortable window seeing as how 300-400MB are the most common upper limits I've seen.[*]They let you adjust your capped data plan within that usage period if you do go over or if you want to save some extra money that month. (Personally, I'd put in a repeating calendar event into iCal that reminds me to check my data usage a day or two before my billing cycle is over. If I'm under 200MB then I call 611 and get it dropped, thus saving $10 more that month.)





    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer View Post


    They only face greater bandwidth limitation due to the present limitation in RF technology to manage that bandwidth and refine it. In ten years the bandwidth they have will be no different, yet the services and coverage will have expanded rapidly.



    I disagree. I think you are forgetting both the increase in data phones among consumers and the increase in the amount of data per each phone.
  • Reply 55 of 90
    Oh, yeah! Deregulation! Don't fall far it. We know all too well how that old story goes!
  • Reply 56 of 90
    blastdoorblastdoor Posts: 3,583member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by WIJG View Post


    Yes, according to Ayn Rand (and others).



    So what is the justification for that assumption?
  • Reply 57 of 90
    asciiascii Posts: 5,936member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by WIJG View Post


    Yes, according to Ayn Rand (and others).



    Ayn Rand didn't say all rights are property rights, that's a Libertarian position not an Objectivist one.
  • Reply 58 of 90
    aaarrrggghaaarrrgggh Posts: 1,609member
    Initial ignorant posts on this thread really piss me off, and then people that actually get it finally started into the discussion...



    The concept is artificial scarcity. The telcos for some strange reason insist on making it real scarcity.



    Case in point: AT&T's Microcell(tm). The devices limited to 10 registered users, and does not support both hand-off and hand-on transfers to their towers. Imagine trying to use that for an office. For 50 people, you need five of the things, and you still run the risk that a user will be on the other side of the office and not have signal, because "their" cell is closest to their desk.



    If the providers really wanted to deal with the problem, we would be seeing significant proliferation of micro and pico cells that expand their network for all of their customers. Design nice packages to mount to street lights, and make them feature rich enough so it is transparent from the user. Stick them in every restaurant, offer them to landlords as a way to differentiate their buildings... Maybe even be willing to sell them as CPE where an owner gets a kickback based on usage! In the last case, not only do they improve the level of service for the end-users, they leverage their wireline services to keep them from becoming obsolete.



    The problem isn't insufficient spectrum, it is the desire to maintain large radius towers.
  • Reply 59 of 90
    blastdoorblastdoor Posts: 3,583member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by ascii View Post


    Ayn Rand didn't say all rights are property rights, that's a Libertarian position not an Objectivist one.



    WIJG said that "all rights are property rights".



    I'm asking for a justification for that statement. Why should anyone accept that assertion?
  • Reply 60 of 90
    anonymouse, very eloquent speech. I could not agree more. Thank you!
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